Just three months after New York City dentist Bert Goldfinger bought the
Red Barn restaurant in upstate New York, a freezer holding more than 60
gallons of homemade ice cream broke down. Without the freezer, called the
hardening container, Dr. Goldfinger couldn't make the eatery's trademark
dessert for the coming Labor Day weekend.

That was one of the budding chef's first signs that running a restaurant
would be a markedly different experience from operating his orderly
Manhattan dental practice.

Later that same week in 2001, Dr. Goldfinger had to remove part of a
recently renovated back wall of the 100-year-old converted barn to make
room for his new $10,000 freezer. He has since replaced most of the major
equipment and installed commercial stoves and a wall-mounted potato slicer.
With his wife and business partner, Chris Jones, Dr. Goldfinger has turned
what was once a rundown ice-cream and hot-dog joint into a country bistro
with fare ranging from local delicacies like fiddlehead ferns and shad roe
to standards such as New York strip steaks, New England lobster rolls,
meatloaf and hot turkey sandwiches.

Juggling Act

The story of how one businessman goes from treating teeth four days a
week to weekends of peeling 500 pounds of potatoes is one of a juggling act
in management skills. What worked in his old world is often useless in his
new one: His new playbook calls for managing teenagers instead of a
seasoned staff, and catering to a fickle culinary clientele.

"As a doctor, I'm treated with a certain level of respect. Patients
generally will follow what I tell them to do," says the 52-year-old Dr.
Goldfinger. "In the restaurant, you're only as good as your last meal."

The Red Barn, two hours north of Manhattan in the small town of Ghent,
serves meals Thursday night through Sunday evening in the summer. During
the winter, it is open Friday night through Sunday brunch.

Dr. Goldfinger often arrives at the restaurant on Thursday a few hours
before he starts cooking, having seen his last patient either late
Wednesday or early Thursday. By the time he gets to the restaurant, he has
stocked up on specialties from the city such as cheese or oils, and has
ordered the vegetables, fish and meat he plans to serve for the next few
days. He buys about 80% of food locally; his seafood comes in fresh from
Boston.

Hannah
Jones Lawrence

OPEN WIDE For Bert Goldfinger, with his wife and partner,
Chris Jones, running a restaurant is a world away from practicing
dentistry

Meanwhile, Ms. Jones, a veteran advertising and marketing executive,
bakes, makes the ice cream, and runs the front of the restaurant, serving
as host and handling reservations. She also takes on other less glamorous
projects, like mopping the floors. "I didn't think about all the
negatives," she says. "There are plenty."

That said, Ms. Jones, now vice president of business development for
Russell Design Associates, a graphics design firm in Manhattan, has
complete confidence in her husband, who has been the driving force for the
restaurant. "He's really talented at what he's doing," she says.

The American public's romance with food and restaurants has never been
greater, as evidenced by the popularity of shows like "America's Test
Kitchen" on public television and last season's NBC reality show "The
Restaurant," about the opening and running of a restaurant in Manhattan.
But most restaurateur wannabes quickly discover the unromantic truth: It's
a tough business with long hours. And while many entrepreneurs have tried
to open restaurants, few survive.

Restaurateur Drew Nieporent, president of Myriad Restaurant Group, which
owns Tribeca Grill and Nobu in downtown Manhattan and Rubicon in San
Francisco, says opening a restaurant today is more difficult than ever.
"The supply seems to outstrip the demand," says Mr. Nieporent, who offers
weekend seminars on opening a restaurant that Dr. Goldfinger and Ms. Jones
attended.

Mr. Nieporent says he has discouraged some people from opening a
restaurant. For example, one wannabe restaurateur proposed spending more
than a million dollars on a small space with not enough tables to support
the investment. "Sometimes it's a little cockamamie," he says.

Back to School

For Dr. Goldfinger, the culinary arts have long been a passion, and he
put himself through dental school working in a catering business. In 1996,
after practicing dentistry for nearly 20 years, he enrolled at the French
Culinary Institute, in Manhattan, and attended night classes for nine
months. He took top honors in his class for designing a seven-course meal
around a potato. For one dish, he made a three-color potato soup -- white,
purple and orange. His dental skills came in handy as he carved a potato to
look like a mushroom for a salad. He also made a purple potato risotto with
rack of lamb and a sweet-potato soufflé for dessert. He says he was
inspired by his teenage stepdaughter, who would eat only potatoes at the
time.

Soon Dr. Goldfinger was working evenings and weekends at the elbows of
celebrity chefs like Aureole's Charlie Palmer and Le Cirque 2000's former
pastry chef, Jacques Torres. He spent two years at Le Cirque 2000, starting
in the pastry division and then working through the other stations of a
kitchen, including as the garde manger, responsible for the cold foods, and
as line cook under former executive chef Sottha Khunn.

Although owning his own restaurant was still in the distance, Dr.
Goldfinger lined up outside the St. Moritz Hotel in Manhattan for a
liquidation sale in January 2000. Unlike most of the crowd that day, he
wasn't interested in the hotel's artwork and furnishings, but instead was
scouting the giant stockpots and sauté pans. Drawing on the patience
he learned over the years running his dental practice, Dr. Goldfinger
returned each day during his lunch hour until he negotiated a lower
price.

Still, financing a restaurant was different from funding his dental
practice. When he finished dental school, Dr. Goldfinger recalls, he had
plenty of access to financing for his new practice because he was a doctor.
Not so with the Red Barn, where bankers wanted to see a detailed business
plan.

To figure out how to write one, Dr. Goldfinger took restaurant
management and finance classes at New York University and the New School in
Manhattan. One class taught him how to organize a menu with a mix of dishes
in a low-to-high-price range and what that variety means to profits. For
example, a grilled-cheese sandwich, which costs only a dollar to make and
sells for $5, has a gross profit margin of 80%, while a steak that costs
$10 and sells for $25 has a lower profit margin but brings in much more
money.

Ice Cream U.

To further his know-how, Dr. Goldfinger also went to Ice Cream
University, a New York-based consulting firm for ice-cream businesses that
offers weekend seminars. And Ms. Jones took a bread-making course at the
French Culinary Institute.

From the start, it was apparent that the restaurant was not going to hum
along like his dental practice on the city's Upper East Side. In offices
shared with his onetime dental-school classmates, he and his office
manager, Lucia, and his dental hygienist, Jennifer, have a long-established
routine. Mouth mirrors, pliers, spatulas, scalpels are neatly stored in
rows of drawers; the Food Network, or the news, is tuned in quietly and at
eye level for patients.

At the Red Barn, the staff is mostly young, and availability is
determined by athletic events, dating and homework. Employees don't always
know the difference between foods. (One waitress referred to shad roe as
"chad roe.") A radio blares in the background, against the sounds of
clanking plates and sizzling beef. Stained copies of "The Professional
Pastry Chef," "Cook's Illustrated: the Best Recipe" and a James Peterson
book on fish and shellfish are stacked in no particular order on one
shelf.

Guessing Game

Ordering supplies offered another challenge. At Dr. Goldfinger's dental
practice, his sterilized tools and materials have a long shelf life, and he
can easily order what he will need for his scheduled patients.

But there is no telling of people's tastes, and Dr. Goldfinger runs the
risk of ordering too much of specific entrees, such as seafood or beef. One
recent weekend, he sold only six of 30 portions of soft-shell crabs. The
next weekend, he cut back his order, buying what amounted to 24 entrees.
They sold out immediately. "Even now I can't always predict what sells," he
says.

Dr. Goldfinger follows a few basic guidelines, like the "economy of the
duck," preached by one of his teachers, television personality and cookbook
author Jacques Pepin. It means that the chef uses every part for something.
In his case, Dr. Goldfinger says, "If I order too much meat, I can use it
for chili. If I order too much chicken, I can use it for chicken
stock."

Taking reservations is also an art compared with scheduling patients
where given amounts of time are allotted for certain procedures. When the
restaurant first opened, Ms. Jones says she was so excited about the number
of customers calling for tables that she overbooked. "Early on, I had too
many people," she says. "We didn't know how to do any of this."

Dr. Goldfinger and Ms. Jones still haven't veered much from their basic
business plan, with a few exceptions. Their takeout business hasn't taken
off yet, and they dropped plans to stay open six or seven nights a week
because they couldn't hire dependable help to prepare and serve the food.
But the restaurant broke even after 2½ years and now is
profitable.

To prepare for their fourth season, Dr. Goldfinger and Ms. Jones closed
the Red Barn this past winter for two months. They made repairs on the
building and added a bar for their coming liquor license. They also took
time to eat out and study menus. When they reopened in April, they added a
few items to their menu, including a Cuban sandwich, cheese fondue and
several smaller appetizer plates. They stopped serving the retro dollop of
mayonnaise on a piece of lettuce with a slice of tomato. Dr. Goldfinger
says bluntly: "It made me sick to look at it." Now they serve a simple
slice of vine-ripened tomato with certain entrees.

The restaurant has a following of local residents and weekenders, and
patrons include photographer William Wegman and TV personality Al Roker,
who featured Dr. Goldfinger on his Food Network show. Ms. Jones has used
her marketing skills as well. She writes the Red Barn Blog
(theredbarn.typepad.com/the_red_barn_blog), an online journal where she keeps regulars up-to-date on what is
being served (ramps, lobster roll, banana and strawberry ice cream, for
starters) and chronicles the trials and tribulations of running a
restaurant.

When they were forced to shut down the restaurant one weekend, Ms. Jones
wrote: "Bert was very upset...especially when he saw the cars pulling in
and out of the parking lot after they read the 'We're closed due to a
broken pump' sign. I had all I could do to keep him from jumping off the
roof of the walk-in [refrigerator]. Definitely not high enough to do the
trick."

Despite the headaches, there is an obvious upside. Dr. Goldfinger says:
"People look forward to coming here. They would rather be here than at the
dentist."

Ms. Kranhold is a staff reporter in The Wall
Street Journal's New York bureau.